I was temped to just send our devs the City Escape mp3 as the track for that level lol

Thank you! Cityskape basically felt like a really fun Harmony assignment because I wanted to use a lot of tonic major 7th chords and that meant that I had to remember how to set up and resolve 7th chords properly

Also, you may be wondering why I haven't linked to the game yet. The reason is because the game is actually literally, and I do mean literally, unplayable. The Game Jam was an exercise in teamwork in more ways than one. We failed the exercise, but it was fun.

TLDR we wanted to make an animal crossing-y home decorator with 3 nice settings to decorate, and then 2 dudes joined in and wanted to blow **** up in VR so now...... well I'll show you how it ended up via A Tweet, but be informed that if you try to play it at home you uhhh can't. The controls are locked and you have to pull up task manager to quit the game.

on an entirely different note i had a really good time composing sound effects to go with bit/cheer notifications on stream. i tried to make the base one actually nice and then just turned it into an increasingly ridiculous visual and audio ****post.

audio is very quiet for reasons i am still grappling with but..... i spent so much more time getting the echo on the gun to be just right than anyone will ever know lmfao

Trying to make myself actually be musically productive more. Anyway right now it's just a midi piano skeleton but I'm working on an arrangement of Crimson Pride, my favorite track from Tales of the Abyss:

**** that heres a version of karma where the vocals are replaced with jade saying abs except pitch corrected

edit: today was a bad brain day but i was also very musically productive. in addition to the masterpiece above i started working more on the crimson pride arrangement. still got a ways to go but PROGRESS

I took Yggdrasill's theme from the Symphonia OST, which is this badass minor-key dramatic villain song with lots of gongs and church organ and **** and sounds all evil and hella dope; but re-imagined it in a major key as if it's his heroic theme song from before everything went to crap. I composed it last year but I completely re-voiced and re-balanced it and I like it a lot better now.

I made a re-orchestration/arrangement/cover/whatever of my favorite track from the Tales of the Abyss soundtrack. The atmosphere, tone, voicing, and harmony are all super different. I'm actually really pleased with it.

I think there is probably more I could do with balancing and production, but after spending so long on it, I think it's for the best if I move on to other things and come back to this maybe later if I want to when I'm more experienced.

It's called "Crimson Pride's Cadence" because at one point I was experimenting with writing lyrics and that was part of it and then I scrapped that idea because I don't sing well enough to be part of a polished composition, but the name stuck with me anyway.

A little info on my process, because I used this one to learn a lot, I think:

- I made a 4-voice arrangement a while ago and published it in piano MIDI just to sort out the voicing. That was the melodic and harmonic framework for the piece.

- Spent the majority of the last several months working on fleshing it out, finding the right instruments to use, which parts to double, etc etc etc. I also ended up changing the composition at some points once I decided to have a kind of violin/cello duet happening.

- Once I finalized the arrangement, I went about trying to publish and balance it in GarageBand - this was a couple months ago. Was somewhat satisfied but something still felt off.

- Made some more adjustments to composition, plugged those into the GarageBand file, and it was still good but now over produced.

- Mixed that version back together with a completely raw unpolished version to get a nice medium.

- Put that **** in Audacity to tweak the tempo so the start is SLIGHTLY slower and the rest is SLIGHTLY faster.... just to make the transition feel like it picks up a bit, give it slightly more life

- Put it all BACK in GarageBand for some final balancing/editing, and decide it needs More Still. Record a very basic percussive line and add dynamics so it is just barely audible throughout, giving a nice driving force to it.

- Experiment with adding ambient pads here and there, end up going with some echoing marimbas I played on my laptop keyboard with a **** of reberb for atmosphere at the start, and add some more vibraphone to emphasize the transition into the main part

- Profit

This was my first actual use of dynamics which I know is a shame. Usually I tend to just... mix a volume to each voice. Honestly I still only did it for the percussion and some of the ambience so I could stand to do that more, but practice is practice and I'm still glad I did that.

The arrangement itself was really great for harmony and voice leading. I'm really thankful for my background in classical music because I really enjoy Western harmony and tried to apply it here.

One thing to work on in the future is probably being yet free-er with tempo, and working more on dynamics being... well, dynamic, for each individual voice.

i could make a long Post TM about this but im lazy so TLDR realized i missed playing **** so ive been working on a cover/arrangement of toad town from paper mario 64. the piano is pre-recorded on my keyboard but it was my performance as well. i havent played cello in months so forgive the rust, im not done arranging it so i didn't try too hard to get a really good take lol

spoiler because i used a bad word in the tweet but was too lazy to upload again elsewhere:

updoot, i finished the harmonization. i am not about to record cello at 11:20pm on a thursday in an apartment complex but i did record it on piano and played along with it at the quietest setting so at least i have a recording of the arrangement. hopefully i'll record the cello part sometime this weekend.